[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

Minimally invasive and might be effective. I like it.

Isn't downvoting a valid a signal? Why should it necessarily be discouraged?

Is there anything that keeps sock puppets from voting? Wouldn't the offenders just switch to those?

I think a better alg is the author of the max downvotes on one person. It just seems to me that downvoting per se is not necessarily a bad thing.

It's usually a debacle when moderators start punishing people, particularly when the moderators are also members of the forum.

God's wrath should be reserved for significant issues. But I'd be in favor of God sending a vision to the perpetrator "You're causing me a problem that I don't want to have to figure out. Do you really need to do this? Can you knock it off?"

It was/is the same for me and others, too - small blocks of downvotes on old comments until they reach your first one, and then periodic block downvotes on your recent comments.

I also suspected that it is done by hand at first, but now I am leaning towards it being done with a bot/script (something adapted from reddit most likely), since it happens to many users and the pattern is quite regular over a long time.

downvoting feel pretty terrible

It may feel so, but that is not strictly an argument, isn't it? Why does is affect you so strongly? Isn't voting the valid expression of the voter? As there is a limit to it maybe the limit should be changed.

See also my comment here

For what it's worth I find the SSC comment section pretty unreadable, since it is just a huge jumble of good and bad comments with no way to find the good ones.

I think people go to Slate Star Codex, because that's where Scott writes his articles, not because of the voting mechanism.

From the paper:

authors of negatively evaluated content are encouraged to post more, and their future posts are also of lower quality

Seen that at LW a few times. At some moment the user's karma became so low they couldn't post anymore, or perhaps an admin banned them. From my point of view, problem solved.

I think it would be useful to distinguish between systems where the downvoted comments remain visible, and where the downvoted comments are hidden.

I am reading another website, where the downvoted comments remain proudly visible, with the number of downvotes, and yes, it seem to enrage the user to write more and more of the same stuff. My hypothesis is that some people perceive downvotes as rewards (maybe they love to make people angry, or they feel they are on a crusade and the downvotes mean they successfully hurt the enemy), and these people are encouraged by downvoting. Hiding the comment, and removing the ability to comment, now that is a punishment.

Tricky one. I had a look at the Facebook group and was slightly horrified. You know all the weird extrapolations-from-sequences lunacy we don't get any more at LW? Yeah, it's all there. I think because there are no downvotes there.

I'd rather kill karma entirely than refactor it into an upvote-only system. If you're trying to do anything more controversial than deciding which cat picture is the best, upvote-only systems encourage nasty factional behavior that I don't want to see here: it doesn't matter how many people you piss off as long as you're getting strong positive reactions, so it's in your interests to post divisive content. That in turn leads to cliques and one-upmanship and other unpleasantness. It's a common pattern on social media, for example.

The other failure mode you get from it is lots of content-free feel-good nonsense, but we have strong enough norms against that that I don't think it'd be a problem in the short term.

Specifically:

By applying our methodology to four large online news communities for which we have complete article commenting and comment voting data (about 140 million votes on 42 million comments), we discover that community feedback does not appear to drive the behavior of users in a direction that is beneficial to the community, as predicted by the operant conditioning framework. Instead, we find that community feedback is likely to perpetuate undesired behavior. In particular, punished authors actually write worse in subsequent posts, while rewarded authors do not improve significantly.

In a footnote, they discuss what they meant by "write worse":

One important subtlety here is that the observed quality of a post (i.e., the proportion of up-votes) is not entirely a direct consequence of the actual textual quality of the post, but is also affected by community bias effects. We account for this through experiments specifically designed to disentangle these two factors.

They measure post quality based on textual evidence by spinning up a mechanical turk on 171 comments and using that data to train a binomial regression model. So cool!

When comparing the fraction of upvotes received by a user with the fraction of upvotes given by a user, we find a strong linear correlation. This suggests that user behavior is largely "tit-for-tat".... However, we also note an interesting deviation from the general trend. In particular, very negatively evaluated people actually respond in a positive direction: the proportion of up-votes they give is higher than the proportion of up-votes they receive. On the other hand, users receiving many up-votes appear to be more "critical", as they evaluate others more negatively.

Incredibly interesting article. Must read.

EDIT: Consider myself updated. Therefore, I believe downvotes must be destroyed.

I do not like the voting and commenting system at Slate Star Codex.

Digging into the paper, I give them an A for effort--they used some interesting methodologies--but there's a serious problem with it that destroys many of its conclusions. Here's 3 different measures they used of a post's quality:

• q': Quality as determined by blinded users given instructions on how to vote.
• p: upvotes / (upvotes + downvotes)
• q: Prediction for p, based on bigram frequencies of the post, trained on known p for half the dataset

q is the measure they used for most of their conclusions. Note that it is supposed to represent quality, but is based entirely on bigrams. This doesn't pass the sniff test. Whatever q measures, it isn't quality. At best it's grammaticality. It is more likely a prediction of rating based on the user's identity (individuals have identifiable bigram counts) or politics ("liberal media" and "death tax" vs. "pro choice" and "hate crime").

q is a prediction for p. p is a proxy for q'. There is no direct connection between q' and q -- no reason to think they will have any correlation not mediated by p.

R-squared values:

• q to p: 0.04 (unless it is a typo when it says "mean R = 0.22" and should actually say "mean R^2 = 0.22")
• q to q': 0.25
• q' to p: 0.12

First, the R-squared between q', quality scores by judges, and p, community rating, is 0.12. That's crap. It means that votes are almost unrelated to post quality.

Next, the strongest correlation is between q and q', but the maximum possible causal correlation between them is 0.04 * 0.12 = 0.0048, because there is no causal connection between them except p.

That means that q, the machine-learned prediction they use for their study, has an acausal correlation with q', post quality, that is 50 times stronger than the causal correlation.

In other words, all their numbers are bullshit. They aren't produced by post quality, nor by user voting patterns. There is something wrong with how they've processed their data that has produced an artifactual correlation.

It would be interesting to run the voting data for LW through the analyses they made.

this paper seems to say exactly the opposite of complaints I've heard from people about how posting on lesswrong is scary because they don't want to get downvoted.

I'm figuring that he'll see this post sooner or later.

yeah, a mod who cares and has time is just the thing.

Unless this is a different person from the person who has been the cited mass downvoter every other time it's come up, they have very definitely been warned.

Speaking with the person and convince them to behave differently in the future should be the first choice.

Second.

"being welcoming" is not actually good for a community if you want standards to be high.

and cause defection spirals.

Example?

Make your downvoting ability proportional to upvotes in the past month rather than upvotes ever?

Back in the stone ages, I believe the Extropian list had extensive configurable collaborative filtering mechanisms. I didn't use them much, but that seems to me the actual solution. Let people trust who they want, and follow who they want. I see a Karma Score configured by me.

The failures of old mailing lists and Usenet were why social mediums universally abandoned killfiles and similar filtering mechanisms: the balance of costs was all wrong - a large number of people had to take affirmative action to ignore the small number of bad apples. It turned out to be better to actively curate the default than to thrust the burden of filtering signal from noise onto each and every user.

To give an Extropian-list-specific example: determined harassment was why Nick Szabo stopped posting there. The filters didn't help there.

I'm assuming "false" here is based on the assumption that upvotes/downvotes should be a reflection of the voter's opinion of the particular comment being voted on, not his or her opinion of the user making the comment without regard to the content of the comment itself. Mass downvoting seems like a strategy for conveying a message about a user, not a comment, and that is plausibly a subversion of the karma system's intent.

I kind of strongly disagree with this. What kind of community are we, if you have to worry about being publicly shamed for an offence that gets banned at some later date?

Creating new accounts is trivial, but since it requires a high karma rating to mass-downvote people, it's likely that the downvoter was at least somewhat invested in their membership here.

A reminder of what downvotes are for. This is what we would get more on a website without downvotes or banning; but the banning could be circumvented by creating new accounts.

Sometimes I wish that comments were made wiki style with tracked edits and the like so that you could always see what someone was responding to.

I have seen advice that you can vote however you want.

I guess it was silently assumed that you would read the things, and then vote, not just execute a content-independent voting mechanism.

I have seen advice that you can vote however you want.

From other comments, that's not actually true. You can only downvote 4 times your own karma. I'm guessing few knew that.

It's harmless and could be beneficial. It doesn't close the case, though.

This isn't a legal system; it's a blog forum. Legal systems impose themselves on non-consenting participants, and therefore are properly subject to procedural and moral restrictions that do not apply to consensual social systems.

Trying to apply the proper restrictions of a legal system to an informal, consensual social system leads to all sorts of weirdly biased results. Another example is the popular notion that "innocent until proven guilty" applies to conversation or personal opinion about a person who is believed to have done something wrongful — at least, when the accused is a member of my tribe, and thus someone who I empathize with.

This isn't really very retroactive - mass downvoting has always been disallowed/looked down upon, it is just that [it was claimed that] there was no way to tell who is an offender in order to punish them.

Even if we don't apply the rules retroactively to whoever this is, it's a perfect opportunity to come up with some rules and them apply them in the future.

The basic rule of all social spaces is "don't be a dick"; more detailed rules are elaborations of this. This seems to be considered a pretty clear violation.

Whatever happened to "no penalty without a law"(nulla poena sine lege)?

I haven't seen any mention of that principle in any of the CEV or TDT articles. If you want to argue that the principle should be a substantial part of a decision framework I invite you to write an article laying out your reasoning in detail.

Indeed. How is banning anyone going to provide a stronger signal than an announcement saying "this is a banworthy offence starting now"?

It seems to me that all we can possible accomplish here is throwing away possibly-constructive commenters.

It's highly probably that anyone with enough karma to do any sort of damage with this is a high or medium-value user; downvotes have a cap based on one's own karma total.

One could argue that this sort of behavior is antisocial and implies the perpetrator is probably not someone we want on the site. But that's exactly the logic that leads to downvoting everything a person has posted!

As one of the people who was downvoted, I find it highly probably that whoever was responsible (in my case, and probably others) was acting in good faith. How could they have known to abide by a rule we are just now introducing?

I don't see a public spectacle - the names were redacted, etc. And Kaj's post seems to be asking "what should our policy on this be" to me.

Is there an explicit law against publicly and retroactively applying rules to someone? No? Shut up.

I agree with most of your points, but there is absolutely no way to prevent discussion. Even if it is somehow blocked on LW, it will happen elsewhere.

Can any user downvote, or is some karma needed? It would be good if only users with karma at least, say, 20 could downvote, because that would prevent creating a new account for safe mass downvoting. (Similar system is used at StackExchange.) I'm saying this because if we adopt a policy of detecting and punishing mass downvoters, their logical next step would be to mass-downvote using a different account.

You can't give more than 4 * your karma number of downvotes.

If an obvious case of mass-downvoting is detected, there should be an ad-hoc tribunal made by three people from MIRI / CFAR / Trike. The tribunal should decide whether the situation deserves punishment or not. It is their choice whether their decision includes asking the offender's explanation.

This will waste too much of their time and it is a bit too subjective.

Yes. Comments with -1 or lower karma are remarkable and generally glided over as provisionally bad unless the reader takes care not to, comments with 1-3 karma are not notable.

Has mass upvoting of a single user (by a single user -- that is what we are talking about here) ever happened?

Quality control. Ideally, people should not upvote/downvote based on conclusions they disagree with.

I recall hearing that the highest-karma comment ever was criticism MIRI, which would suggest that this works as intended. I'm not sure how to check this, though.

ETA: found it.

It'd make it somewhat more salient at the very least, but technical patches like these often come with unintended side effects. The moderation burden here is pretty light as it stands; as long as the tools exist to do the analysis I don't feel it's an undue burden on the mods to empower them to deal with things like this.

I'll also note that it's historically been a lot easier to get mod time than to get dev time.

People already rarely downvote. (Well, except for those who do the mass downvoting.) Making the downvotes 5 times weaker, that's almost like removing them completely. Almost no one would bother.

Strongly disagree. I've been involved in user-facing administration before, and binding yourself to a narrow set of policy rules (especially on a site like LW, where they aren't well documented) is about as useful as drinking antifreeze. It's tempting, sure, since we've all been socialized to believe in the rule of law and no ex post facto punishment and all that good stuff. But the truth is that that only works in government because government runs a well-developed legal framework that's had centuries to fill in its loopholes and smooth its rough edges. And it still requires a lot of discretion on the part of its various enforcers.

You can't make loophole-free policy that's more specific than "don't be a jerk", not if users are going to be interacting with each other in a reasonably natural way. You don't have the time or the expertise. That means you'll occasionally need to extend or invent policy to deal with cases that aren't well covered, and that means you'll occasionally piss people off. It's okay. It comes with the territory.

That said, block downvoting is common enough behavior that we probably should have policy to deal with it. Ideally policy and code, but that's probably not going to happen.

I think unwritten rules of etiquette probably are punishable, in the sense that "don't be an ass" is essentially rule zero of every site ... but surely they were acting in good faith here, to discourage low-quality submissions (in however misguided a manner) as the karma system is supposed to?

I really don't see why this can't simply be punished going forward. Ideally, the people responsible will know to stop and no-one will ever need to be banned for it. After all, isn't the main problem that it was driving away users?

No rule prohibited mass downvoting.

No rule prohibits burning down the servers that LW runs on. It's just that certain standards of behaviour are expected, here as anywhere else, and when rules are made, it is in order to clarify things where that is thought necessary.

Mass downvoting by one individual against another has emerged as a questionable phenomenon. Proof of its questionability: it is being questioned. Also, no-one has owned up to doing it, no-one has defended it, and if the motivation were concern for the good of LessWrong, the targets seem oddly chosen for that.

BTW, I was once the target of a bulk downvote. I had around 400 karma at the time and dropped 40. I thought, hahahahahahahahahaha! A dog barked; the caravan moved on. But the current practitioners appear to be operating on a larger scale.

This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user's privacy!

Voting is anonymous, in that your votes are not published to anyone else. That there is a database recording every vote that everyone has ever cast is obvious. How does the site ensure you only get one vote on each comment? How does it show you your own votes? Because it knows.

That such a database, given that it exists, will be examined in sufficiently egregious cases, is also obvious. However, I have not yet seen any instance of personal voting information being made public.

Mass downvoting would be a legitimate, non-anti-social choice if the votes were counted in a proper Bayesian way, in terms of the evidence they provided. The mass-downvoter's votes would provide no evidence, and so would count for zero.

Rather than look at the rules as logic tests that must be passed for an action to be punished, look at the rules as informing what behavior is allowed and prohibited.

Choosing to dislike every post by a specific user because it is by that user is simply harassment. Choosing to dislike a poster /without providing feedback/ as to why is counter to the principles of good communication.

No rule prohibited mass downvoting.

Distinguish mass downvoting from indiscriminate downvoting. If most comments someone writes are terrible, there shouldn't be an issue with downvoting those bad comments (except perhaps if you also systematically hunt down all comments, including very old ones, making the average estimate of user's work severely skewed towards your own judgement). This would be a kind of mass downvoting, but not indiscriminate.

Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content?

I agree. It would be great to also have a method of expressing disapproval of particular users ("This user has N friends and M enemies" or something), but indiscriminate downvoting of comments isn't it, it conflates different signals (quality of specific comments vs. overall impression about a user) and makes them less useful.

This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user's privacy!

Can you point to a space on this website where the website makes the promise to keep voting anonymous?

That you have to violate posters' rights to make it work is just further proof.

Who do you think gave posters that "right" and where did the grant it?

Given the way US law works they probably couldn't even grant you that right if they wanted to do so.

No rule prohibited mass downvoting. Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content? E.Y. has advised users that they need not have a rational reason to downvote; not liking something suffices. Well, why not dislike everything by some poster?

Well, I believe the ideal is for users to learn what type of comment other users dislike, and adjust their behavior. If you signal that everything they do is bad, then they can only "adjust their behavior" by leaving the site - and if new users are chased off by this, it's bad for the LessWrong community.

With that said, *I don't think it's reasonable to punish this. The user(s) responsible were, presumably, acting in good faith to improve site, as they saw it. It should be punished going forward*, but banning them will only serve to render their actions even more useless. I wont improve their future actions. I doubt it will even act as a useful signal, compared to an announcement that this is now against the rules.